My semantic net knows three programs that can read RTF.

     o   :concept/software/majix %
     o   :concept/software/RTF2FO %
     o   :concept/software/ScroogeXHTML %
     
http://purl.net/stefan_ram/garnoo/XOCATALOGUEXOYTREEGXOPROGRAMMINGXOLANGUAGEXSYR
YTYFXOREADER

 As one can see there, this includes at least two that are
 available as Java libraries.

 An RTF document is written with Java as follows.

new java,io.FileWriter( "example.rtf" ).
append( "{\\rtf\\ansi Hi!\\par}" ).close();

 General information about RTF:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa140277(office.10,d=printer).aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa140297(office.10,d=printer).aspx
http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/rtfspec_45.html

Open it in Word, and then save as HTML? Ofcourse word produces
TERRIBLE HTML.

Then again , RTF is designed as a style markup, and HTML is desiged as
a semantic markup. They aren't exactly compatible.  Most people can
see RTF, anyway, why convert to HTML? Perhaps you'd be better off
converting to PDF, if you're really concerned about webability.